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The Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS.edu) is the largest public policy Ph.D. program in the nation and the only program based at an independent public policy research organization—the RAND Corporation.

Water Resources Management

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Fresh water is an essential and often scarce resource, and ensuring its optimum use and availability for sanitation, drinking, manufacturing, leisure, and agriculture requires significant planning. RAND research on water resources management has focused on flooding in Vietnam, scarcity along the Colorado River Basin, California's water plan, and Qatar's environmental needs.

Pittsburgh is struggling to manage and improve its aging water system, with a focus on elevated lead levels for many customers. What steps could help steer the city toward a permanent solution and protect future generations?

Gaza has long had water and sanitation challenges, but today it's in a state of emergency. The crisis could be resolved through greater investment in water and power infrastructure as well as more water or electricity purchases. But political complications and other barriers remain.

Explore Water Resources Management

As the Los Angeles region increases its reliance on groundwater sources to become more resilient in the face of drought and to reduce demand for imported water sources, advances in the information available on groundwater quality and contamination could help community water systems avoid health hazards and better ensure a safe drinking water supply.

With climate change already generating storms, heat waves, and droughts beyond historical norms, local governments need to do more to prepare. A decisionmaking framework developed by RAND allows communities to stress-test ideas, weigh the trade-offs, and plan for a range of possible futures.

This study developed a framework consisting of long-term models for electricity supply and water systems management, to assess the vulnerability of potential electricity infrastructure expansion plans to the effects of climate change in Africa.

This study uses integrated hydrometeorological simulations over the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa (ACT) River Basin in the southeastern United States to understand the impact of climate change on probable maximum precipitation.

What are the potential effects of climate change and sea level rise on flood risk, ecosystems, and water quality in New York City's Jamaica Bay? How can flood risk be reduced while also improving water quality, restoring habitat, and improving resilience to extreme weather events?

Florida's Miami-Dade and Broward counties are vulnerable to flooding and intrusion of saltwater into drinking water. These risks are driven by sea level rise, changes in precipitation, and urban development. How can the region adapt?

A targeted approach could help the federal government address the root causes of infrastructure problems more effectively than a spending initiative that simply spreads money around with the hope that more spending might do some good.

Overall, this study suggests that climate change and land use can significantly affect TMDL implementation plans; identifies how one such plan might be modified to address the resulting vulnerabilities; and demonstrates how robust decision making methods, employed with existing simulation models, may be able to generate legally acceptable plans that are robust and flexible in the face of climate and other uncertainties.

Water professionals can think about building resilience as a process of embracing and managing future uncertainty. Rather than trying to predict which problem to plan for, researchers help planners consider a wide range of potential scenarios.

This issue highlights recent RAND research on suicide prevention; on the scope of the humanitarian and security crisis in the Mediterranean region; and on what RAND is doing to improve the security and well-being of people throughout the Middle East.

The city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding region face significant—and potentially growing—stormwater management challenges. Analysis can help better understand the system's vulnerabilities and identify solutions.

RAND has opened an office in the Bay Area to foster collaboration with the region's leaders and researchers working to solve today's complex problems. Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist, is leading the new office.

RAND opened its San Francisco Bay Area location to serve as a research hub at the intersection of technological change, innovation, and public policy at all levels. Beau Kilmer, a senior policy researcher, is leading the office.

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Researcher Spotlight

Director, RAND Center for Decision Making Under Uncertainty

David Groves is director of the RAND Center on Decision Making Under Uncertainty, codirector of the RAND Climate Resilience Center, and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He is a key developer of new methods for decisionmaking under deep uncertainty, and works directly with…

Craig Bond is an applied microeconomist at the RAND Corporation who specializes in natural resource and environmental economics, including stochastic dynamic modeling, resource valuation, consumer and producer choice, and applied welfare economics. He is also a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate…

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